Heidegger's Being and Time by Dermot Moran

Dermot Moran’s “Heidegger’s Being and Time” attempts to evaluate the place of Being and Time in the phenomenological tradition subsequent Husserl. Moran understands the tradition of phenomenology, to the extent that phenomenology can be called a tradition, as the divergent amalgamation of thinkers operating in their own self-identified practice of phenomenology. The common strand found in each of these thinkers is an emphasis on dealing with phenomena as such, and for Heidegger particularly this is understood as acknowledging the appearance of objects insofar as they appear in Dasein (literally "being there").

The central aim of Moran’s paper is to lay out the phenomenological aspects of Heidegger’s inquiry in Being and Time. To do this, Moran begins by relating the genesis and evolution of Heidegger’s phenomenology, prior to the publication of Being and Time, as germinating in his review of Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of World Views, in his interpretation of Aristotle, and in what Moran calls Heidegger’s “critical appropriation” of Husserl’s phenomenology as a practice along with Husserl’s conception of intentionality. Heidegger criticizes the abstract quality of Jasper’s philosophy of life in favor of a phenomenology historically bounded by a living being, he infuses Aristotle’s concepts with phenomenological content, and he created a distinct method from the basic notion in Husserl’s phenomenology (“to the thing in itself”) while throwing out key notions to Husserl’s phenomenological enterprise (e.g. intentionality and the transcendental ego, among many others). All of this provides the groundwork, says Moran, for Heidegger’s enterprise of asking the question of the meaning of Being.

Moran continues to develop Heidegger by discussing the distinction between ready-at-hand and present-at-hand, the “fusion of phenomenology with hermeneutics” (234), the hermeneutical circle, the nature of Dasein, authenticity, angst, mood, and being-with. A being’s being ready-at-hand or present-at-hand has everything to do with how the thing (construed phenomenologically) discloses itself to Dasein: as a tool or as an object of inquiry. Moreover, an object’s being ready-at-hand is how it is initially disclosed to Dasein. By the fusion of phenomenology with hermeneutics Moran has in mind Heidegger’s understanding phenomena as the primordial datum associated with being-in-the-world that are given meaning through interpretation. This interpretation is always done in a context of prejudices (taken non-pejoratively) or what Searle calls a background of information (though Heidegger's conception is at least as rich as Quine's "web of belief"), and the interpretation itself creates and destroys prejudices (or background information, or nodes in the web of belief). This view of the world leads to what is called the hermeneutical circle, construed by the naïve observer as the “circle” Heidegger is stuck in between prejudices and interpretation. The objection is that Heidegger cannot account for new knowledge. The objection is easily avoided by considering Heidegger’s notion of being “thrust” into the world, that being-in-the-world is primary, and that we are and can only be able to gain knowledge by allowing phenomena to disclose their being. This latter possibility requires diligence on the part of the enquirer for its realizability. Moran goes on from there to give phenomenological descriptions of Being-as-authentic, being-towards-death, mood for being, and being-with-others.